The Richest of Them All
by Iliya Moroumetz
Summary: While Matriarch Aethyta never wanted for money, it took only a few individuals to realize how fortunate she truly was.


**Note: The Prompt which inspired this was 'Aethyta as a grandmother'. And that was it. Naturally, my imagination being the obnoxious monster it is, ran away with the idea and involved the half-hanar sister Liara apparently now has. Enjoy!**

* * *

"Abu," the asari infant said casually while Aethyta gave her a half-lipped and lop sided smirk. No matter how old she got, the Matriarch would always be a sucker for a pair of cheeks like the one her first grand-daughter had. Sure, she'd headbutt anyone who'd give her grief about it, but that didn't make it any less true.

"Ya don't say," the Matriarch replied. Since she never had a chance to raise Liara, she found herself often at a loss as to how to correctly interact with Nezzie's offspring. Sure, her half-hanar daughter was pleasant enough as she was, but she was a bit too loose in how she conducted herself. She blamed the jellyfish.

"She's usually a lot more verbose than this," Jane Shepard, who sat beside her Father-in-Law with a beaming smile at her first daughter. "You should hear her recite the Athemenian Scriptures."

The Matriarch levels her eyes at her daughter-in-law. While they got along well enough, there were certain… incompatibilities that would, at times, make her question her daughter's choice in mates. However, Aethyta had no room to argue, as Benezia's parents didn't take too kindly to her, either. Which was why Jane Shepard was given a bit more leeway with Liara than anyone else.

She had to give the human credit, though. She was serious about her daughter. The fact she threatened the Matriarch at the very mention of the old spinsters back on Thessia ordering a hit made it clear how fiercely devoted she was. Goddess protect anyone that even thinks about bringing Liara to harm. If she didn't put them into a singularity strong enough to squeeze them into a coffee cup, Shepard would make sure there wasn't anything left.

Liara chose wisely.

"She's just the cutest thing!" the wide eyed Asari beside Aethyta and Jane said with an excited smile. Both Matriarch and retired marine cocked an eyebrow. Amanea, Aethyta's surprisingly tall, half-hanar daughter, always seemed a bit flaky, but thankfully harmless.

"Isn't she? She's my kid after all," Jane said proudly. Aethyta snorted in response. Though the Matriarch had a silent respect for humanity, she didn't, however, enjoy their consistent boasting… even if she was right. While Amanea meant well, she never seemed to last long enough with any potential mate to give her the grandkids she wanted to spoil. It would have been a point of contention between them, had Amanea could remember the fact that Aethyta had been bothering her for centuries about it.

To think it took her shy and socially awkward daughter with Benezia to finally follow through. Miracles never seemed to cease.

"Oh!" Amanea spoke up happily, "she has your eyes. Such a vibrant green!"

"Yep. And she'll save the galaxy someday too, just like her mother did," Jane said with an air of pride about her.

Aethyta was about to make another snarky retort when she realized she was referring to Liara. She reached up and tickled the infant's nose, which caused her to giggle happily. The Matriarch found it easy to agree with her human daughter-in-law. She had to think on that a moment. True, Shepard was a woman, but in the case of her role as being the one that fathered her grandchild, it made her consider calling Shepard her son-in-law.

Bah. Humans just had to make things arbitrarily more difficult than they needed to be.

To her surprise Jane wrapped an arm around the Matriarch's shoulders and joined her in the adoration of her grandchild.

"Aethyta, I never got a chance to say thank you," the human turned to the elder asari and said with all sincerity, "for everything. For Liara. For your help_._ I'll never be able to repay you for all you've done. "

The Matriarch was never one for sentimentality. However, she'd have to make an exception in this case. She was also glad that Liara was still asleep. Otherwise, if she were to see what she'd do next, she'd never live it down. She leaned into the human and smiled, "just be good to my girl and consider us even, ok, babe?"

Shepard's smile turned wry, aware that the elder asari wasn't used to this kind of affection. "You got a deal."

A sniff brought them both to see Amanea crying happily. "It's so beautiful…" Before either one of them can do anything, she took them both in a loving embrace, sure that the infant, who was confused at the goings on, was not squished between them.

Jane blinked and turned to her in-law, "is she always like this?"

Between an eye roll and a chuckle, Aethyta said, "yeah. But you'll get used to it. She means well, so, bear with her, alright?"

Jane then patted the shoulder of the happily weeping asari that held all three of them in a loving embrace.

What none of them knew was that Liara had recorded their meeting. And while she normally would have used it for emotional blackmail, it would become the singular most watched video she would keep for the rest of her life.

* * *

Several days later, Liara and Amanea found themselves walking in one of the few remaining districts of Illium's trade centers.

The day after tomorrow was an asari holiday known as _Silvisan_, or a more practical translation for other species would call it "Parent's Day', but that seemed so banal. Besides, it meant more than that. It was a celebration of the bonds mothers often developed with their children, regardless of they were the sire or the bearer of the child.

Naturally, for families whose children and parents were not on the best of terms would often result in less than savory encounters. Liara had heard somewhere that holidays such as this were like thunderstorms and that we all had to endure them together.

Were it not for the Reaper War, there would have been countless invasive advertisements for sales and discounts in many of the stores in the center they were in. However, several of them that were guiltier of this than others found themselves out of business when one of the giant mechanical tentacles reduced it to rubble.

Irony is a fickle thing when it comes to business, evidently. Liara recalled this particular chain was especially guilty of providing the lowest prices at the cost of asari dignity. How… unfortunate, that their corporate headquarters was the first thing hit when the Reapers landed on Thessia. Granted, when the asari would rebuild, this particular chain wouldn't missed too much, on account that it shared the same kind of reputation that an human store chain had where it seemed to only attract the dregs of that particular society.

"Do you suppose any of the traders that go to Alliance space survived the invasion?" the taller asari said as she and her younger sister kept to the side to avoid the general flow of the populace.

Liara looked down the thoroughfare where a combination of civilians and workers, who did their best to reclaim a sense of normalcy after the Reaper War, mingled about.

"I would imagine," Liara said as she recalled a few reports from Glyph about a few traders that dealt in human goods. "when news of the Reapers came, the trade and shopping centers were more or less abandoned. And the Reapers ignored them." A few asari collected human items, mostly for novelty, if anything, since some had a passing interest in humanity, on account that their general shape was more or less the same.

"It's all about the fingers!" the taller asari said excitedly, unaware that Liara had been thinking in the same direction as her scatterbrained thoughts went. "All the other races have three. It's a relief to see another species finally get it right!" To prove her point, Amanea flexed and waved her fingers as though she were weaving magic with them. Liara now understood why Aethyta was worried about her at times.

Liara wasn't entirely sure if Amanea was aware that humanity's 'five-digit'ness was a natural part of them, but figured it best to let the flaky elder asari have her fun. If one were to ever make Amanea cry, it made you feel bad. Aethyta once told her that her demeanor was so pleasant that when a krogan accidentally made her sad, the one ton warrior did his best to make sure she was laughing again. Granted, it wasn't a hard task, but still.

As they moved down the thoroughfare, Amanea's constant chattering, ranging from the most obscure of subjects, Krogan Opera, to the most bizarre, Krogan Opera. Liara found it difficult not to smile at her sister's demeanor. Not to mention she seemed to be one of the few asari that didn't care that she was Pureblood. When they had first been introduced, it had been far tenser on her end than it had been on Amanea. Imagine her surprise when her elder sister took her in a loving embrace and spun her around until had Aethyta shouted, "Don't break this one, dammit!"

As the pools of people began to thin out, Liara and Amanea reached the end of the possible places they could have looked.

"Well," Amanea huffed and put her hands on her hips, "this is no good." Their search had led them to more destroyed shops, since it seemed the Reapers didn't give a hoot about the finest in asari fashion.

"Agreed. We would be better off using extranet searches for items from Conpus Station," Liara said, slightly despondent. She cared for Aethyta; her insistence that she be given grandchildren, emphasis on _children_, to spoil, notwithstanding.

With their search bearing no fruit, they both silently agreed to return to their hotel. With nothing for them on Illium, the only other option they had was Thessia itself, and that was hit harder than Illium was.

Both tensed when they heard the sound of rustling feet surrounding them. Before either one of them could exclaim a thing, two batarians and a krogan prevented their escape.

Amanea blinked and held a hand to her cheek in surprise, "Oh my!" It never occurred to Liara if her half-sister was capable of defending herself. She seemed far too pleasant a person to hurt anyone. Instinctively, Liara stepped in front of her sister and locked eyes with the krogan as he stomped up to them both.

"Alright," he growled, as he brandished his knife, which would have been a sword to most other races, "hand over you money and we might let you two live!"

Unimpressed, Liara folded her arms and said, "you realize that the galactic standard still hasn't been reestablished yet."

"So, what?" one of the batarians growled as he whipped his club around menacingly, "it'll be worth something and if you don't want to end up missing, you'll hand over what you got!"

"Still," the other batarians said as he turned on his stun baton, "I'm sure there are surviving Hagemony Warlords that'd enjoy paying for a few asari."

Thoughts raced through Liara's head as she attempted to think of a way out of this without bringing herself or her sister to harm. However, before she could properly formulate a plan, Amanea calmly walked around her and up to the krogan. She looked up to the sky serenely.

Confused, the krogan asked, "what are you-" Amanea's head collided with his head crest hard enough to send him tumbling backwards.

The Shadow Broker was about to turn to deal with the batarians, but found it pointless as her elder sister twirled in the air with all the grace of a dancer, only to swing her leg out to strike the first batarian's head. The blow tossed the thief off of his feet and into the wall.

The instant she landed, the elder asari moved as smoothly as though she were running water in a field of blue light, quickly closed the distance between the last attacker and struck her palm into the other batarian's sternum. The would-be thief crumbled to the ground as he struggled to regain the air that had been knocked out of him.

Amanea then drew back to her full height to see the krogan that would have attacked them, shocked and horrified at the asari that had taken out his henchmen. Liara activated her biotics enabled a field around herself to show him that the odds were now stacked against him and that retreat was a preferable course of action.

To her relief, he dropped the knife and ran off.

The danger passed, Liara turned to her sister and said, "where did you learn how to fight like that?"

"Oh!" Amanea said when she realized that Liara was talking to her, "well, mother wanted me to be able to take care of myself, since she knew I'd be an easy target. So, she was able to convince Matriarch Trellani to take me under her wing and make me her personal bodyguard for about a century. Learned a lot of neat things then!"

Liara balked. Matriarch Trellani was one of the most, if not *the* most, influential asari tradeswomen in the galaxy. Such fame also made her a prime target for rival corporations. So, in order to defend herself and her interests, she developed a program that took every sort of self-defense technique, from biotic, to technical, to martial, strategic, and so on, dissected them, learned them, and as a result, ended up defeating more enemies in the business world than anyone could ever imagine.

And Amanea was her bodyguard for a century! The same Amanea who blinked and then smiled in delight for a reason beyond the Shadow Broker as she hopped past her younger sister to where the krogan was a moment before. The elder asari picked up the knife and said happily, "We can give this to mother!"

Liara was about to protest, but then she remembered the fact that her father was, in fact, half krogan… though, it wasn't supposed to work like that. However, considering how old the blade looked, it could have been stolen from Tuchaunka by their would-be attacker.

"You may have a point. Though, I may have to run some scans on it to see what blade it is, exactly," she said as she turned on her omni-tool to cross reference krogan antiques.

"Oh, don't worry, this is _Shiagur's Defiance_," Amanea said with a smile as though it were nothing.

Liara balked gain. The blade wielded by the legendary krogan female, who was said to have slaughtered over three hundred of the mightiest turian soldiers during the Krogan Rebellions with it. Most thought it was lost to time or destruction. How some lowly cut-purse came into possession of it, she'd never know.

"How do you know that?" Liara asked, unsure if she wanted to know the answer.

"The markings on the handle," Amanea replied, excited at the prospect of getting Aethyta a gift she'd truly like, "this pattern," she pointed to a rather vicious looking character excitedly, "was Shiagur's clan: _Venog_. They were excellent cooks!"

Liara scolded herself for not assuming that Aethyta would have taught Amanea anything about her krogan heritage. .. and it still didn't work that way.

"If that is the case, then it seems we are done here," Liara said, as she considered scanning the weapon to make sure it was authentic, as there was always the chance it could be a fake.

"She's going to be so happy!" Amanea chirped as she took her younger sister by the hand and excitedly dragged her younger sister away from the scene.

While Liara would never truly understand how her elder sister's mind worked, she would, however, be sure to thank Aethyta for being the parent she needed... Eventually.

THE END


End file.
